Swarm Creativity Blog

Happiness = Respect + Compassion = Kindness Respect and compassion are the two key properties of a benevolent society. To have happy citizens, it is essential to have both.  China is respectful but not compassionate, the US is compassionate but not respectful. And citizens of both countries are not particularly happy, at least compared to small Northern European countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, or Switzerland. Finland makes sure that workers in less qualified professions still get a decent wage sufficient to lead a dignified life. Switzerland is compassionate even with lobsters, it is the only country on the world with a law that forbids to boil them to death alive. Unfortunately, in this regard the two most powerful countries on Earth, both vying for global leadership, still have a long way to go. Americans are empathetic to their weak, but show no respect to their unqualified workers. Living in the US nearly half the time over the last twenty years, I observed that people wi

While we are still stuck in the fangs of Covid-19, we all hope that soon the virus will fade away, and we will be able to go back to our old lives. However our old existence will not come back! For better or for worse, live will never be as it was before. Actually, I think it is for the better! Covid-19 has profoundly and positively changed the way how we are conducting our private and professional lives. For a start, being stuck at home for months has got many of us to questioning the meaning of our old jobs. Many decided that they did not want to return to their nine to five office job anymore, and switched careers for something more meaningful. But also the ones sticking to their old jobs are experiencing profound change. One of the main changes is in the way how business meetings are conducted. Before Covid, salespeople, managers, and many others would hop into a plane taking multi-hour flights for a short meeting with a customer or manager, assuming that there is no substitute for

We are not resources.     We are not capital.     We are not talent.     We are not labor.     We are not manpower.     We are bees.     We are all members of the same swarm.     In preindustrial times, people were like bees, creating what they needed, growing their grain, baking their bread, sewing and stitching their clothes, and building their furniture and houses. With the onset of industrialization, division of labor arose, and managers started to manage their resources - one of which happened to be their human resources. But humans don’t particularly like to be resources – being a resource implies being a passive asset, which is being moved around like a pawn in a game of chess, without agency and own will. Synonyms like “human capital”, “talent”, “labor”, or “manpower” are not much better. “Human capital” is even worse, as it conveys the connotation of foreign ownership: according to definition, capital is an asset owned by an individual or organization available for a purpose s

In my p revious post I introduced human bees, ants and leeches . Swarms of bees are motivated by creating something radically new, to draw satisfaction from inventing something that has not been there before, pollinating others and creating honey in the process. Ants are social insects too, who show loyalty to their swarm, but are obsessively competitive, motivated primarily by trying to win at all costs, be it in sports or in professional life. Leeches are more solitary insects, living off the blood they suck from others, motivated by money, and by trying to get rich as quickly as possible through whatever means available. I created the three tribes in tribecreator , training the machine learning system with the Twitter feeds of Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, JK Rowlings, and the profiles of 150+ other creatives such as designers, musicians and artists. The ant tribe was trained with the Twitter feeds of 150+ athletes such as Rafael Nadal, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, plus Nascar race

In an earlier post I have spoken about human bees, sheep and leeches. This post extends this concept to the flow experience of groups of humans collaborating in groupflow .  The flow experience per se can be reached in many areas, from sports, art, and music, to professional teamwork. Csikszentmihalyi even describes criminals enjoying their burglaries, and the extreme example of the Marquis de Sade enjoying his sadistic behavior. On the flip side, perfectly legal flow activities might cause pain to some of the involved parties, for instance the dog and cock fights in some parts of the World, the bull fighting in Spain, or the boxing matches in the US and elsewhere. It is therefore worthwhile dividing flow experiences in three different categories sorted by positivity for the involved parties: first, the enjoyable experience of creating something radically new that has never been there before, second the gratification derived from competing against others or oneself in sports ranging f